Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades Read online

  “They say there are three men for every woman in San Francisco,” I said. “Not so many years ago it was ten to one.”

  “But it is not merely young men, I understand. Married men as well.” So we had been thinking of the same thing.

  “A relief to their wives,” I said.

  “I don’t understand that, Mr. Redmond.”

  “The gratification of the husband often endangers the health of his wife.”

  Her silence indicated that she didn’t understand that either, and I was digging myself deeper into this matter than was proper.

  “Wives who already have six or eight children,” I added. “Or ten or twelve.”

  “Yes, I understand,” she said quickly.

  I turned to see the breeze riffling the curls that wisped around her face, which was set and intense as she gazed down on Morton Street. I glanced away so as not to be caught admiring her.

  “Was she pretty, the murdered woman?” she asked.

  “She was French. She had a bit of mustache, but she was pretty, yes.” I could feel the expression on my face, like mud drying.

  “Very young?

  “Not very young.”

  She rubbed her hands over her forearms as though she was chilled and said, “Mr. Redmond, young women of my station are very innocent of the life that goes on around them. We were speaking of our educations just now. I would like to take advantage of your more comprehensive education.”

  This time it was I who didn’t know what she meant. I found my own hands smoothing the sleeves of my jacket, in imitation of her gesture.

  “Will you escort me down to Union Square and Morton Street, Mr. Redmond?” she said. “So I may see something of these‌—‌stews with my own eyes.”

  “Tonight?”

  She giggled suddenly. “My brother will be shocked. May I tell him you will escort me home?”

  “Certainly!” I said, shivering.

  So I accompanied Amelia Brittain down off Nob Hill, she in her cloak and bonnet, I wearing my derby and pretending more command of the evening than I actually felt. Her hand rested lightly on my arm. We turned down Bush Street in the darkness between the illuminated corners and passed men in groups of two and three. Some tipped their hats to Amelia.

  The Alhambra Saloon, Boss Chris Buckley’s headquarters, wore a crown of balls of light. Just as we were passing, a group of drinkers pushed their way outside, boisterously laughing and compounding my nervousness.

  Among his consort of cronies was the Blind Boss himself. His fat white eyeballs stared straight ahead, his hat was cocked on his head. Amelia and I were surrounded by his bunch.

  “Good evening, Mr. Buckley,” I said. He would recognize my voice, for the magic of his hearing was that he could identify people by voice or even, some said, by footstep.

  “Good evening indeed, Tom Redmond!” His face was wreathed in the ripples of his famous smile. “And how are you this pleasant evening, my friend?”

  I introduced Miss Brittain.

  Buckley doffed his hat and hunched his shoulders in a half bow. “And would this be the daughter of James M. Brittain?”

  “Yes, he is my father,” Amelia said in a strong voice.

  “The highly regarded mining engineer,” Buckley said, nodding. “Good evening to you, Miss Brittain. Your companion is a very fine young man, as I am sure you know. You must take trustful care of her, Tom. Good night, Miss Brittain! Good night, Tom!”

  And he was swept away in his clutch of courtiers, who had, all, tipped their hats properly.

  “That was the infamous Blind Boss!” Amelia whispered. Her hand had tightened on my arm.

  “That was the famous Chris Buckley,” I said, and turned us to cross Bush headed for Morton Street.

  It was no place for a lady, and I was sorry I’d ever contracted for this tour before we even reached Union Square. The streetlights here burned more brightly while the shadows between were denser and alive with the movement of hatted men passing every which way, and restlessly grouping together. They generated a deep rustle of conversations. The fog was blowing down the streets with shivery air that seemed to touch my face like fingers.

  “I don’t believe I should take you any further along here, Miss Brittain,” I said.

  “It is by my request that we are here, Mr. Redmond. Is there danger?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Are you concerned that I will be insulted?”

  “Yes. “

  “I believe I can tolerate that. Can you?”

  “Not without responding,” I said.

  “It is a difference between the genders,” she said.

  We were in an area where the difference between the genders was celebrated. We edged between and past the groups of men toward the entrance to Morton Street. Amelia’s hand lay on my arm an ounce more heavily. Morton Street slanted down from Stockton, crowded with men. A police wagon was just turning into it, blurred in the fog, two helmeted policemen aboard, one standing with the reins, the other shouting to give way.

  In the general low uproar of Morton Street female voices were raised in what sounded like lamentations, punctuated with a hysterical shriek, so that I halted with Amelia’s hand clutching my arm. The pair of us was bumped by hurrying men.

  In a great tangle of illumination and shadow and blowing fog were red lights and a red window shade with a ball of gaslight over it. I could make out a commotion lurching toward us, a draped figure held up on a moving dais. It was a body covered by a sheet, four men bearing it like some primitive ceremony, two policemen and two other men, one with a striped shirt. The body was carried on a door, held aloft and borne to the wagon, not thirty feet from where Amelia and I were hemmed in by silent men. The door and its burden slipped into shadow as it was stowed in the wagon bed. The helmetless policeman mounted to the driver’s seat with the driver. He was Sgt. Nix, white-faced where he stood six feet above the crowd of men staring up at him.

  Nix held up an arm, a hand signaling to someone; two fingers extended from his fist. A hundred feet down the street a woman shrieked again.

  “We must get away from here,” I said to Amelia, who was thrust against me by the press around her. “Pardon me,” I said. “Pardon us, please. Pardon!”

  I managed to steer her out of the crowd.

  “What is it, Mr. Redmond?” she cried out.

  “Another woman has been murdered,” I said. “I must take you home now, Miss Brittain.”

  I hailed a hack on Sutter and Amelia and I rode in silence up the steep hill to Taylor Street, where I climbed a dozen steps with her and bid her good night.

  At that time Bierce’s prophecy that the Railroad was involved in these murders seemed preposterous to me.

  “I am sorry our tour turned out so tragically,” I said.

  “I will never forget that scene, Mr. Redmond!” Amelia exclaimed. “The multitude of men, the smells! The fog, the reddish glow, as though there was a pink smoke rising. And those men with their swathed burden! The women’s voices! The sense of terror and excitement. And the Blind Boss with those eyes like mushrooms!” She sounded breathless, one hand clutched to her bosom. The door was opened by a liveried butler.

  “Thank you and good night, Mr. Redmond!” She disappeared inside.

  I was shaken as I descended the steps, for it seemed Amelia Brittain had seen more of that hellish scene than I had.

  I told the hackie to take me to the City Morgue in Dunbar Alley, where I would view my second corpse, the second victim of the Morton Street Slasher.

  3.

  CYNIC, n. – A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.

  –THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

  On Bierce’s desk was a skull, polished white as chalk, with outsize eyeholes and a grinning undershot jaw. His office was on the second floor of The Hornet’s premises on California Street, with a view out a window at the traffic in the street. Miss Penryn, the typewriter, rattled away on her
machine in the next cubicle. Downstairs were the reporters’ and Mr. Macgowan’s offices. The press was in the basement. Bierce kept a neat desk, with albums of old Tattle columns on a shelf, and two of Fats Chubb’s caricatures framed on the wall. One was the opera singer Adelina Patti in the shape of a plump, upright trout, mouth open singing. The other showed the Railroad as an octopus with suckers on the tentacles that were miniaturized faces of the Big Four.

  Bierce and Mr. Macgowan listened to me relate what I had seen at the Morgue. Bierce stroked at the sparrow-wings of his mustache, frowning, and Mr. Macgowan leaned his big belly forward in his chair, so, with the skull, it was like having three grim faces watching me.

  The stench had been terrible. The knife had opened up her bowels, the man in the leather apron had told me. “They said the two of spades was stuck in her mouth,” I said.

  “Was she French too?” Bierce wanted to know.

  “Irish. Esther Mooney.”

  “And the fellow was seen?” Mr. Macgowan asked. He was a beefy gent of about Bierce’s age, with a walrus mustache framing a set of chins.

  “One of the other girls might’ve seen him. Young chap with fair whiskers coming out of the room. I have this from Sgt. Nix.”

  “Esther Mooney and Marie Gar. Any connection?”

  “Just Morton Street, as far as I can see.”

  “A series is certainly implied,” Mr. Macgowan said. “An ace and a two. The Morton Street women must be in a fright.”

  I said I’d seen Captain Pusey at the Morgue.

  “The photographic nonesuch,” Mr. Macgowan said.

  Isaiah Pusey was Chief of Detectives, Sgt. Nix’s superior. He had assembled a criminal identification system of which he was very proud, albums of photographs of every criminal who had appeared in the San Francisco courts and a collection of national and international photographs as well. He bragged that he could identify any criminal whose likeness he had seen. He had made trips to London to confer on the British Crime Index, and to Paris to investigate the Bertillon system. It was considered that San Francisco criminals were sufficiently identified so long as Captain Pusey was on hand with his elephant memory and his photographic archive.

  His chair creaked as Mr. Macgowan leaned forward again. “A weekly is at a disadvantage, of course,” he said. “The Chronicle and the Alta can cover this day by day. Mike De Young will go the sensational route.” Mike De Young was the Chronicle.

  “Smithers can cover Central Station. That’s what he’s good at.”

  Bierce said, “I want something different than what Smithers or Gould would give us. Tom has seen the bodies. I’m going to ask him to work up supplemental material to run opposite Tattle.

  “Tom and Sgt. Nix are baseball chums,” he added.

  Mr. Macgowan squinted at me.

  “If Pusey is involved, he must have had a sniff of money,” Bierce went on, with a flare of his nostrils that indicated his opinion of the Chief of Detectives. Most of the police, like the Supervisors, were on the boodle from the cribs, cowyards and parlorhouses, the gambling joints and saloons. Elmer Nix was probably relatively honest, but it was difficult to follow the straight and narrow in wide-open San Francisco. The Fire Department was proud of its rectitude.

  Bierce had announced that the corruption stemmed from the State Railroad Monopoly, but it did not seem that simple to me.

  “Maybe they’ve already got their man,” I said.

  “That would be the culm and crown of wonder,” Bierce said.

  Under the headline SECOND MORTON STREET SLASHING, the Alta California had printed:

  This morning the City was startled by the news that a second murder in Morton Street had been added to the terrible crime committed on Monday. The murder took place during the evening hours in an establishment presided over by Mrs. Cornford, in an upstairs room. The victim was a woman of 29 years, Esther Mooney. The same process had been followed as in Monday’s case. She had been seized by the throat and her cries choked until she was strangled. Her torso was then slashed open. The murder was discovered when blood seeped beneath the door of her room.

  Chief of Detectives Isaiah Pusey has announced that the murderer will soon be apprehended, but no arrest has been made at this time. The tenants of Morton Street are dismayed by these crimes. Dr. Manship, who was called to view the remains of this victim, gave it as his opinion that the same man, evidently a maniac, had committed both murders. The inquest will be held at 11 o’clock Thursday morning.

  There was no mention of the spades, or their progression.

  Tattle, that week, made no reference to the murders, which had occurred after The Hornet had gone to press, but Bierce had taken shots at his usual targets:

  “The worst railroads on the Pacific Coast are those operated by the Southern Pacific Company. It owes the government more millions of dollars than £eland $tanford has vanities; it will pay fewer cents than Collis B. Huntington has virtues.”

  He reiterated the fact that the cost of the transcontinental line had been kited to twice the maximum estimates. “Collis B. Huntington and his associates have made enormous fortunes by letting contracts to themselves‌—‌a felony under our state laws‌—‌dividing the profits and burning the books.”

  Of the Spring Valley Water Company he had written that it “flowed with bilk and honey,” and “Included in the cost of the water is the price of nine Supervisors.”

  His usual theological butt was the Reverend Stottlemyer: “His latest announcements from Washington Street intimate that the praise for the propagation of the Lord’s only begotten son could perhaps more fairly be shared. Certainly in the realm of plucking pigeons the proprietor of the Washington Street Church reigns supreme.”

  In Mrs. Cornford’s establishment on Morton Street, I was taken upstairs to inspect the scene of the murder. Off a narrow corridor that bisected the second story were doors at regular intervals, tin numbers over the doors. Number 7 was a room about eight by ten feet, stinking of carbolic. It contained a bed stripped of its mattress, a straight chair, and a stand that held a white crockery bowl and pitcher. The floor had been scrubbed until the pine boards looked soft as chamois.

  I interviewed Edith Pruitt in the parlor, under Mrs. Cornford’s surveillance. Edith had heard some sounds in the crib next to hers and had seen the man depart. I sat in a wooden rocker with my pencil and pad, Edith on the window seat and Mrs. Cornford planted in the middle of the settee. The room was redolent of orris root, furniture polish, sweat and, faintly, an odor like rotting flowers with a medicinal tinge to it.

  “He was a young man, you told Sgt. Nix.”

  “Maybe about as old as you, mister.”

  “With a beard.”

  “With a fair beard, yes.” Edith Pruitt was a farm girl with a pleasingly plump bosom in her chaste gingham check, and a pretty piglike expression of fat cheeks and narrow eyes.

  “Anything else about his appearance?”

  Edith glanced at Mrs. Cornford, who smiled at her reassuringly. Edith shook her head.

  “Did you see the knife?”

  “She didn’t see no knife,” Mrs. Cornford said.

  Edith showed her teeth in her nervousness. I tried to think of questions an experienced reporter like Jack Smithers would ask.

  “What were the sounds like, that you heard?”

  “Like somebody fell heavy on the bed. And some scraping. I didn’t think what it might be. Sometimes a mister will pay extra for extra business.”

  “Esther would do that,” Mrs. Cornford said, nodding.

  “How long after the racket before you saw the man?”

  “She told the copper maybe five minutes,” Mrs. Cornford said.

  “You kind of know how far along you are with a mister, you see,” Edith Pruitt offered.

  Mrs. Cornford smiled at me. She had a tapestry bag in her lap, from which she had taken a wad of blue yarn and two ivory needles.

  When I returned to the subject of the man Edith had seen, Mrs. Corn
ford said, “The big copper had a photygraph. The higher-up one.”

  “Captain Pusey?”

  “Older fellow with a shock of white hair. He had this photygraph.”

  “And was it the man?” I asked Edith.

  “I told him it were him, all right,” Edith said. “I told him I’d heard there was a mister, maybe it was this chap, that didn’t have no dingle.” She colored prettily. “Had to use a kind of leather thing strapped on. Might’ve been this one.”

  She hadn’t seen this mister, only heard about him from Esther. Mrs. Cornford looked disapproving, whether of the lack of the dingle or the information proffered, I couldn’t tell. No, none of the other girls had mentioned such a client.

  The murder of Marie Gar had taken place at Mrs. Rose Ellen Green’s place, but Mrs. Green was tired of sightseers and reporters and turned me away at the door. I inquired of other madams up and down Morton Street if there had been any reports of a mister with no dingle.

  No luck.

  Bierce’s office was L-shaped, and I’d been promoted to a desk, a chair and a spittoon in the foot of the L.

  I was writing up my notes when Miss Penryn put her head in the door to announce Miss Amelia Brittain. I jarred the desk jumping to my feet. Amelia wore a white dress with shingled lace on the bosom. Beneath a shadow of bonnet her face was stiff with anxiety. She swept the skirt of her dress past the doorjamb, her eyes fixed on me.

  “Please sit down, Miss Brittain!” I dragged a chair around the corner.

  She tucked her skirt under her and sat, daubing at her eyes with a handkerchief from her reticule.

  “They’ve arrested Beau!”

  I gaped at her. “For the Morton Street murders?”

  “Yes! It is simply‌—‌monstrous!” She daubed at her lips. “They took him to jail. Mr. Redmond, I must again ask your assistance!”

  “Anything.”

  “They say they have his photograph that one of the women in the premises where the murder took place has identified.”

  Captain Pusey’s photograph!

  “Mr. Redmond, I must believe it is a plot! Certainly Beau has enemies, any wealthy man has enemies. His mother must have enemies!”